


I'll Be Good

by altruistic_mendacity



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1956, Ambiguous Time Travel, Gen, Insidious Dependancy, M/M, New Beginnings, Non-Linear Narrative, PoC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 10:09:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12166818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altruistic_mendacity/pseuds/altruistic_mendacity
Summary: Tom Riddle comes to terms with need - because proclivity demands a peculiarity.(( ALTERNATIVELY: an ambiguous time travel blurb where an aspiring Voldemort garners an unwitting exception and Harry Potter won't and will put up with Tom Riddle 's shit in unequal measure.))





	I'll Be Good

**Author's Note:**

> To avoid confusion: Henry Anderson is Harry's alias.

**He rings the doorbell.**

It rings for an eternity, the sound reverberating round his cranium dripping in mortification. He shouldn't be here, he was thirty years old and confused, looking for solace in the secular age of the one person that -

That mattered, in this tiny world of lights and lies, that closed on a perspective with three little words. The one person that turned his head, held his gaze, engaged his little shattered soul. This being - essence - presence, that befuddled and befell and beatified.

Turning red from blood to apples, darkness from cover to safety, green from death to warmth.

Tom Riddle Jr. was a serial killer and a facade, a smile sharper then any blade. He thrived amongst deceit and torture and whispers of fear, King of all that was to be governed, walking corruption across the street and daring to seize what lay beyond the lines no one had ever crossed.

His mind whirled and buzzed and wanted and nothing was ever _enough_.

Until windswept hair lacked a wind to sweep it and kindness garnered a breathing vessel. Until Qudditch falling off the pinkest of tongues became a priority and orange juice always taken without pulp. Until tattoos spun a tragedy greater then Hamlet and feeling was **okay**.

Until _he_ became enough. Fearless and frail, witty and wondrous, brilliance - a smile perpetually lodged in molars and sweet vowels curling full lips upwards - effervescent and blinding. Until wrong gained a meaning in quiet disappointment and loss, a great gaping chasm, could be felt. Until hurt in iridescent irises tied the knot of the noose that he hung himself on.

"Mr. Riddle?"

"Pl- Don't slam the door."

Until Harry. 

* * *

 

_Their hands brush against each other in the dark, attracted like the two polls at the end of a magnet, north and south, positive and negative though not nearly as simply and clearly defined and something within him settles, recedes, rests. A battle is won, treaty signed, hands shaken, peace established and life emerges from its ashes, war's ruins._

_Balance._

_He can feel the yin and yang in their tangled digits, their skins contrasting and clashing and melding atop the yielding sand just as they did, as they had. Their breaths come out in languorous sighs and the stars winked appeased above them as Harry begins to laughingly hum a stupid little muggle rhyme. Life is unraveled neatly and quietly between semi-conscious introspection and Morpheus's beckoning embrace._

_"Twinkle twinkle.... how I wonder what you.... are..."_

_It's a simple epicurean philosophy._

_He treasures these little moments in ataraxy, lucid robust equanimity, fleetingly cocooned in their own little Hellenistic school, him and his Hermachus with rolling seas and breath taking sunsets - where beauty takes an intangible form, saccharine and vexingly cloying and yet overwhelmingly essential, the missing piece to a jigsaw puzzle he'd long thought complete._

_Because proclivity demands a peculiarity._  

* * *

**A purple mug is pressed into his hands.**

"Sugar?"

His voice travels down the hollow rivulets of his spine, lodging itself in the notches and carving a stinging outline of something he's never felt before -

Before Harry.

Before aching longing and inescapable thoughts and the superficial ruse Henry Anderson.

The leather of his seat slips and slides against him, as tantalizing as the words that elude him, the names to the metaphorical faces raging war with all he knew to be, all he knew to be him, Tom who took what he liked and stood alone. Loneliness hadn't been anything but externally projected before Harry.

"Psychopaths do tolerate condiments, right?"

Tom smiles and finally meets the prophetical orbs that were his undoing. It isn't a smile that speaks for itself, translating through the flash of a canine or the quirk of a lip, it's involuntary and taxing on muscles so unused to complete control, condemning on a mind so unused to a lack of.

He was content before.

He's alive now.

After Harry.

"I'm not a psychopath Anderson, I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research."

* * *

_There's a cave, teetering, seeping, intangible terror and a boy._

_Just like old times._

_He doesn't understand how they got to this point. How the metonymy for momentarily satisfying intrigue became so much more - became everything. Hands stained red and smile as pure as snow, cynical and grateful and unassuming._

_How the man - spider, craven and sticky atop his intricate web of poison, grew dependent on shitty tea and a boy - buoy's laughter and acceptance._

_Acceptance layered like an onion, eye watering and peeled back with each afternoon in the sun or the rain, sat upon wooden chairs long past their prime by a table chipped and worn by the years of people - experiences, cracked heated porcelain placed against their lips in place of words they would never say._

_Until now of course._

_Before everything went to shit._

_"You are a **liar** Tom." _

_Tom - Voldemort, laughs, at the bitter undefeated creature as it gripped his shoulders painfully tight and wasn't that new. Pain and shock. He laughed and shook off the honest liar, drowning in revelations and hurt, aside a roaring, rumbling, swallowing sea._

_Feelings are inexplicable, convoluted and ricocheting and he knows that now with a terrible maligning certainty because the truth is screaming at him, reeling from him and he feels, with a meteoric weight, an understanding within his grasp and he's five again wondering why people persisted with need._

_There was only ever want._

_Until now of course._

_Before Harry._

_"To no one more then yourself."_

_"You need me Tom and I don't want you."_

_"Make the distinction before it all explodes in your face."_

* * *

 

**His breath ghosts his ear.**

Henry passes him his coat, hands trembling Tom accepts it. The hall seems to stretch on forever and standing at the end of it, gave him a sense of atonement to work for, the light illuminating the stairwell something to grasp for, the frames lining the walls a place to strive for.

He _needed_ to _matter_.

"Harry?"

His name is an unanswered question in the air, tasting of singular remorse - uncertainty. Eyes, storm clouds obscured by clear glass and all he still would not share, search his face for something - anything. A sign of admittance, sincerity and despite the thick veil between them, that with every slammed door left him spinning seemingly amidst a Sisyphus conundrum of his own making, Harry inclined his head and it thinned the smallest most significant smidgen.

He steps outside, once more in the cold, flies prepped for the picking, as the butterfly soaring high above them all grins.

"Wednesday?"

He's suddenly very conscious of his halted breathing, the tremor in his voice, the flutter of his heartbeat. Tom Riddle lived and breathed and hurt because he was _Harry's friend_. He lived and breathed and hurt for his _exception_.

"Wednesday."

* * *

 

_Dean Martin wafts across the ether._

_A tiny radio statically relating notes in the corner of a shop he was surprised still stood. He remembers with involuntary - contrary clarity, the months of biting unemployment that he'd like to place behind a rose tinted glass of success. Remembers carrying steaming coffee down the uniform blocks of central London to Borgin's and Burke's, wanting to remember the stolen register cash as his own._

_It hasn't changed, dingy and homey and belonging to a hag with a propensity for insulting. It seems lighter some how, airy and bright, contrasting delicately with the black of the furniture and wood paneled walls. New but old decor lines the continuous vertical, sharp and gothic with a welcoming splatter of eye-watering color._

_Tom sniffs._

_Voldemort snarls._

_And they're shoved forward._

_"Sorry, didn't see you there." A dainty thing haphazardly apologizes, long and lanky, thin and tall - unassuming angles deceptively rounded with wool and quirk. He whirls around, body tense and jaw set to snap, only to be confronted by a widening stunning gaze and for the harsh words to die on his lips._

_Like a ghost the flicker of recognition flares and disappears within unearthly green and like a ghost they too flare and disappear. For some inexplicable reason the urge to strangle the stranger is curbed by an intense intrigue, the kind that usually led to a good day._

_So he follows and orders a bowl of fruit of all things, inquiring as to " - how you happened to know me."_

_The question is in itself so unlike him, the boy seated across from in a mustard jumper and tapped glasses so unlike him, the stirrings within him so unlike him. A cicatrix is casually hidden, any height difference leveled by rickety seating and a glowing gaze awkwardly averted as his own burned with unfamiliar curiosity._

_"Um, I ran um into you at the uh door." Fingers subconsciously fiddle with a woman's wedding ring, a head of curls turned away as his bowl arrives. Dead mother, his mind supplies and he knows it was summarily of his own doing. "And you're name?" He presses, for the first time in a long time unsure of the purpose that drove him._

_"Ha - enry, Anders - on." Two rapid blinks, and a shift of bird bones beneath wool. Lie, as if splayed in front of him the words flash and he nearly laughs because they aren't tinged with fear but with defiance. A challenge set in deflection - one he would unravel like the mystery in front of him._

He nearly chokes on a pomegranate seed.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: All characters and situations recognized are dervied from the works of J.K Rowling and belong to her.


End file.
